Under a consent decree filed last week in U.S. District Court, dead people who used to live in Mississippi's Walthall County will no longer be allowed to vote there.

The AP on Thursday reported the deal, in which the county agreed to scrub its voter rolls of people who shouldn't be voting - a list that could theoretically include disenfranchised felons, cadavers used for medical research, Civil War veterans and people who are still alive but in Alaska.

Secretary of State Delbert Hosemann has long complained that the state's registered voter rolls are bloated. Walthall County, for instance, has 12,752 registered voters despite having only 11,219 voting-age residents in 2012, according to the AP. That's a difference of at least 1,500 registered voters who definitely should be purged from the list. But because only around 75 percent of the eligible voting population nationwide is registered, there's a good chance that thousands more no longer belong on the voting rolls either.

Conservative groups have pointed to these issues as a reason why voter ID laws are a good thing, though opponents say voter fraud isn't actually all that common and worry about suppressing qualified voters who lack identification.

The lawsuit that sparked the settlement was brought by what I can only assume is the conservative version of the ACLU, the American Civil Rights Union. The group apparently believes voting rights should be restricted to those who can perform such complex tasks as breathing and filling out a ballot.

The deceased voters of Walthall County could not be reached for comment, and I'm having a hard time finding other opponents of the decree.

Notably, the ruling does not explicitly address the voting rights of the undead - those who once died, and were then reanimated, like, say, a zombie. But because the process for disqualifying a dead voter involves cross-checking with the Social Security Administration and the Department of Health, there may be a way for disenfranchised corpses to retain their voting rights by reactivating their Social Security numbers.

But honestly, that sounds like an awful lot of paperwork to vote in the local tax collector's race post-mortem.

Sound advice?

A proposal the Jackson legal department said was illegal last year now enjoys a clean bill of health from? the Jackson legal department.

So what's changed since then? Their boss.

The proposal would create a grant program to help out residents who can't afford their water and sewer bills. It was first suggested by then-Councilman Chokwe Lumumba but was opposed by then-Mayor Harvey Johnson Jr. During subsequent meetings, the city's attorneys warned council members that it might be illegal.

"It was argued by people that are still a part of the current legal department that it was a gratuity and we could not do it," Ward 6 Councilman Tony Yarber said last week. "I'm interested to see how there was an about-face. These are the same people (legal advisers), and now we can do it."

"I do remember the discussion," Mayor Lumumba replied. "I thought it was a little more political than legal to be honest with you."

Technically, the city attorney's office works for both the mayor and the Jackson City Council, but in practice, it works more closely with the mayor.

So which opinion is the legally sound one? We should find out soon enough. Yarber has asked the mayor to seek an attorney general's opinion on the matter. Unless Jim Hood is having trouble paying his water bill, his objectivity can probably be trusted.